Fewer films go live, and maybe it’s better that way

We whose hearts belong to the theater might be tempted to offer a snooty explanation for why there are fewer great screen-to-stage adaptations than there are the reverse. We’re a less commercial medium, and a more creative, artistic one. We don’t need you, film, with all your superheroes and explosions, for story ideas.

Yet that reasoning oversimplifies — film is more than just Hollywood — and it ignores empirical evidence, especially from recent seasons. “Groundhog Day,” “Waitress,” “An American in Paris,” “The Color Purple” and “Disney’s Aladdin” all enjoyed recent success on Broadway (and all but the first will come to San Francisco next year as part of SHN’s 2017-18 season).

Nor is theater’s appetite for film limited to for-profit tours. Berkeley Rep performs an adaptation of “Monsoon Wedding” through July 16, and fall brings TheatreWorks’ world premiere of “The Prince of Egypt” and Marin Theatre Company’s Bay Area premiere of “Shakespeare in Love.”

But for every “Spamalot,” there’s an “American Psycho”; for every “Billy Elliot,” there’s a “Dirty Dancing.”

Stage-to-screen

When theater producers assess whether a story can thrive on the stage, first considerations are often logistical. How many performers and locations does the show call for? (The fewer, the better, an unforgiving principle that many rightly chafe at.) What kind of effects does it require, and can a creative team devise lo-fi, often non-literal ways to suggest them (hopefully with as few digital projections as possible)?

Just as important, though, is what drives a story forward. As my colleague Mick LaSalle writes, adaptation has no set rules, but I like to think of theater, even when it’s not talky and domestic, even when it’s a one-person show, as room-size, interaction-size in scale.

In film, as in literature, you can dive far into a single consciousness, even when a character does no more than stare out a window. A director can communicate leagues about that person through camera angles and foci, a close-up on an eyeball vein in one shot, the whole of planet Earth in the next. In theater, though, we’d tolerate a sequence that solitary, static and quiet for about five seconds.

Onstage, we can’t rely only on image and sound to draw out the quirks and conflicts of character. It takes the sort of back-and-forth that would quickly grow repetitive in film (or most of them), as a maddeningly endless shot-reverse shot. You’d want to tell the camera to stay still — to let you take the set in as if it were a stage.

Below are some screen-to-stage transfers that get it right, and others that emphatically do not:

Best

(1) Brief Encounter (2008): Kneehigh’s adaptation of the 1945 film (whose screenplay Noël Coward adapted from his own one-act play, “Still Life”), came to ACT in 2009, and the Bay Area has been in love with that Cornish theater company ever since. Among its many moments of wizardry, one still stands out, eight years later: when an actor suddenly dived inside a giant movie screen that hitherto seemed solid, a dazzling surprise, and a metatheatrical wink at their own adaptation process. (That the story originated as a one-act might disqualify this title for some, but Kneehigh’s take was so good it needed to be on the list, rules be damned.)

Photo: Matthew Murphy, SHN

Mukelisiwe Goba as Rafiki in SHN's "The Lion King."

Mukelisiwe Goba as Rafiki in SHN's "The Lion King."

(2) The Lion King (1997): Though recent tours have been lackluster, Julie Taymor’s original concept for adapting the 1994 Disney film still stirs. Masks make human actors as fearsome as predators. Puppetry evokes the shapes and movements of the savannah. Tricks with perspective conjure a horizon-spanning stampede, and blazingly vibrant hues make the stage version just as dynamic as the animated movie.

Photo: PAUL KOLNIK, Associated Press

Nathan Lane, left, and Matthew Broderick in a scene from "The Producers."

Nathan Lane, left, and Matthew Broderick in a scene from "The...

(3) The Producers (2001): No genre loves to make fun of itself as much as theater does, so it was only a matter of time before the Mel Brooks film about a bad-on-purpose musical found its way to Broadway. In showing theater at its worst, its most money-grubbing and its least concerned with actual, you know, art, Brooks has so much fun that his lampoon is also a love letter.

Photo: Scott Suchman

Brittany Woodrow (center) and her entourage in the touring company of "Spamalot."

Brittany Woodrow (center) and her entourage in the touring company...

(4) Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005): Speaking of theater making fun of itself, few show tunes do it better than “This Is the Song That Goes Like This,” from this musical spoof of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” It skewers every love song cliche, from when the actors turn to face one another, to where the song changes key, to where singers must leap into their high notes. The rest of the show reprises all your favorite Python jokes, from the two coconut shells to the Knights who say Ni.

(5) A Little Night Music (1973): You could have just the song “Send in the Clowns” amid a heap of garbage, and this Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler musical, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night,” might still make the list. Of course, the rest of the show haunts in its ruefulness, too, especially “Every Day a Little Death” and “It Would Have Been Wonderful.”

Photo: Christian Brown

A scene from "Heathers: The Musical" at TUTS Underground.

A scene from "Heathers: The Musical" at TUTS Underground.

(6) Heathers: The Musical (2014): The macabre, surreal tone and heightened style of the cult Winona Ryder and Christian Slater film practically beg to be further camped up on the stage, where those matching technicolor schoolgirl outfits and grisly murders can both shine all the more brightly. Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy’s lyrics wring laughs from sentiments you should never, ever laugh at: “I love my dead gay son!”

(7) 12 Angry Men (1955): There’s no point in compiling a list like this if you can’t cheat a little. Reginald Rose originally wrote “12 Angry Men” for the screen, but the small screen, in the form of a 1954 teleplay. (The Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb movie version premiered in 1957.) The story’s natural home, however, was always the theater, where it can all take place in a single, claustrophobic jury deliberation room, keeping undiluted focus on its mainspring: the power of persuasive argument and its importance in our justice system.

(8) To Kill a Mockingbird (1990): The courtroom, an inherently theatrical space, also fits on stage in Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, as does the character of Atticus Finch, whose restraint with love and hurt alike gives actors much to play. A new version, adapted by Aaron Sorkin and produced by Scott Rudin, is slated to open on Broadway in the 2017-18 season.

Photo: Courtesy Of "Point Break Live!"

The movie "Point Break" features a famous skydiving scene, therefore the stage show "Point Break Live!" must feature a skydiving scene. Charlie Farrell (right) plays Bodhi, the bank-robbing surfer played by Patrick Swayze in the movie.

The movie "Point Break" features a famous skydiving scene,...

(9) Point Break Live! (2003): Keanu Reeves’ performance as Johnny Utah in “Point Break” is so wooden that the actor seems to be channeling his character’s surfboard. In spoofing the 1991 surf flick for the long-running “Point Break Live!” — which has played at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge — Jaime Keeling came up with an ingenious theatrical device to capture just how unconvincing Reeves is. Each performance recruits an unrehearsed audience member to play the part, reading lines from cue cards. Where in the movie, acting went wrong unintentionally, here it’s bad on purpose, and all the more scrumptious as a result.

Photo: Matthew Murphy, Associated Press

Billy Porter during a performance of "Kinky Boots."

Billy Porter during a performance of "Kinky Boots."

(10) Kinky Boots (2013): From the title alone, you can tell two things: There are shimmery, impossibly tall costume pieces that would benefit from the drama of an onstage reveal, and that this is a story that needs a score you can dance to. In her first effort writing for the stage, Cyndi Lauper supplied the latter, one song in particular asserting an unlikely but ultimately undebatable thesis: “Sex Is in the Heel.”

Worst

Photo: Jacob Cohl

A scene from "Spider-man Turn Off The Dark."

A scene from "Spider-man Turn Off The Dark."

(1) Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2010): So many of us theater people fall in love with the art form as children, in thrall to the magic of stagecraft. But can we stop trying to find new, crazily unsafe ways to make actors fly? We’re never going to be able to compete with film for special effects. Hopefully the injuries sustained by actors in this take on the superhero — as well as its turkey of a script — will remind thespians that onstage, less is more, suggestion more powerful than illustration.

Photo: Katy Raddatz, The Chronicle

Kathryn Foley as Jacqueline "Jackie" Bouvier, left, Carolyn Di Loreto as Lee Bouvier, second from left, Elisa Van Duyne as Edie Beale, second from right, and Paul Myrvold as J. V. "Major" Bouvier, right, at the dress rehearsal of "Grey Gardens" at TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in 2008.

Kathryn Foley as Jacqueline "Jackie" Bouvier, left, Carolyn Di...

(2) Grey Gardens (2006): Albert and David Maysles’ 1975 documentary about two reclusive relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis derived power from its intimacy, its unalloyed depictions of the squalor and delusion by which Big Edie and Little Edie lived their sad little lives. Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie’s musical only makes camp of easy targets. Why make fun of tragic figures who have already sunk to their lowest?

(3) Roman Holiday (2017): Kathy Speer, Terry Grossman and Paul Blake’s take on the William Wyler film, recently seen at SHN’s Golden Gate Theatre, was charmless, devoid of personality. That goes for both the characters, Princess Ann and Joe Bradley, and the setting. It could have been taking place in Duluth, Minn. (and as a native Midwesterner, I mean no disrespect). Even Cole Porter songs provided no respite, their dirge-like arrangements only further bogging things down.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Watch radio come to life at the MainStage Studio Theatre, with "It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play."

Watch radio come to life at the MainStage Studio Theatre, with...

(4) It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play (2006): This one suffers more by comparison than it does in and of itself. Yes, the Dolby sound effects Joe Landry’s script calls for are theatrical, grounding you in the time of the movie. But even if Frank Capra’s film doesn’t occupy a special place in your heart, as it does in my maudlin one, this stage version fast-forwards through emotion Capra builds through an accretion of domestic detail: a loose railing post, a silly inside joke among childhood chums.

Photo: Jeremy Daniel

Billy Harrigan Tighe as JM Barrie and Tom Hewitt as Captain Hook in the touring production of "Finding Neverland."

(5) Finding Neverland (2015): It’s a mark of a great director when she can make a lackluster script not just bearable but pleasant, which was the great accomplishment of Diane Paulus’ direction of the musical about the origins of Peter Pan. (It toured to SHN’s Orpheum Theatre last winter.) Still, songs were impersonal, belaboring a single idea, the characters one-dimensional. And do we really need to see a another show in which a frail woman languishes in sickness while a man triumphs as an artist, thanks partly to her creative spirit?